Cold Fusion -- its history and spurning, and its reality and future

Princeton graduate, Scott Chubb, who is doing cold fusion research at the National Research Laboratory, will discuss the 17-year history of cold fusion, where the field is at today, who the key players are, and what solutions it might offer in the future.

BURKE, VIRGINIA, USA -- On Saturday, Nov. 11, Sterling Allan held a live interview with Scott Chubb, a cold fusion researcher who works at the Naval Research Laboratory, also serves as an editor for Infinite Energy Magazine, carrying forth the work of the late Eugene Mallove.

Cold Fusion, also known as "low energy nuclear reactions," has been one of the most spurned fields of science due to an embarrassing start.  But does it deserve the negative wrap it continues to receive in academia?

Chubb discuss briefly the 17-year history of cold fusion, where the field is at today, who the key players are, and what solutions it might offer in the future.

He wrote the guest editorial in the recent publication of New Energy Times, published yesterday.  The magazine, spearheaded by Steven Krivit, is considered to be the leading journal on low energy nuclear reaction research.

Though cold fusion still gets the cold shoulder in academia in general, it is not always so.  There are some warm pockets within academia that continue to foster unfettered science, regardless of the politics that hound controversial research.

Chubb will review a recent presentation by Frank Gordon and Pamela Mosier-Boss of the Space Naval Air Warfare Systems Center, San Diego, at the National Defense Industrial Association conference, which was held July 31 to Aug. 3 in Washington, D.C.  The New Energy Times called it "Extraordinary evidence."  Chubb says that it is so startling that not only will what they presented be remembered, but that it is sure to have a profound impact. 

The New Energy Times summarized it as "simple, portable, highly repeatable, unambiguous, and permanent physical evidence of nuclear events using detectors that have a long track record of reliability and acceptance among nuclear physicists." 

Chubb applauds their persistence and courage to pursue this research despite the personal sacrifices required and the jeopardy into which it put their academic careers.  "What is truly astonishing is that, because of their persistence, not only have they developed and perfected a procedure for initiating low energy nuclear reactions on demand, they also now have found evidence that they can create a new condensed matter nuclear effect use of external fields to trigger low level radioactivity on demand."

Chubb also discussed some present work being done to implement cold fusion technology into commercially feasible products, highlighting the work by Russ George of D2Fusion.

Chubb is a graduate of Princeton, as was his father, from whom he caught his contagious interest in science in general and cold fusion in particular.  Chubb wrote Hidden Brooks of Knowledge and Strength, Evidence of High Energy Particles in LENR Experiments, and Nature's Inaccurate Reporting of the Bubble Fusion Controversy, published in the Sept/Oct issue of Infinite Energy, which begins with a tribute to his father, just a couple of weeks before his father, Charles E. Chubb, passed away.  "It came from the heart," he said.  Krivit published an abbreviated version of that piece as the guest editorial in yesterday's New Energy Times.

He did not hesitate to accept this invitation to do this interview, even though it was extended just a few hours beforehand.  Unfortunately, he happened to be in the middle of a nap when the show started, and it seemed to take him a while to get fully alert.

The highlight of the show came in the last five minutes when he made the comment that Condensed Matter Nuclear Science (cold fusion) is potentially 2000 times more cost-effective than fossil fuel systems, and with no emissions.


About Scott Chubb

Chubb was born on January 30, 1953 in Manhattan, N.Y. He received his B.A. degree in physics from Princeton University in 1975 and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees, also in physics, from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook, in 1978 and 1982 respectively.

Since 1989, Scott Chubb has been a research Physicist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), in Washington, DC. His interests are in condensed matter physics, many-body physics, precision measurements of time, general and special relativity, electromagnetic scattering, non-linear wave dynamics, statistical physics, nuclear physics, low energy nuclear reactions in solids, remote sensing of the ocean from air- and space- borne platforms, Ethics in Science, Laser-Cooled Atoms, and Atomic Bose Einstein Condensates.

He has been an author of more than 60 refereed publications. He is also an author of one patent for a device related to relativistic corrections in the Global Positioning System (GPS). He has received a number of publication awards from the Naval Research Laboratory, and he was cited by the American Geophysical Union as one of the outstanding reviewers for its journal, J. Geophysical Research, during 1999. He also served as guest editor of a special two issue edition of the Taylor and Francis Ethics in Science journal, Accountability in Research, dealing with the Cold Fusion controversy.

Chubb has been intimately involved with research in the Condensed Matter Nuclear Science (CMNS) area since 1989.  He was involved with an organized program of research that took place and was funded officially through the Office of Naval Research (ONR).  The associated effort was reported in detail in a feature article by Bennett Daviss, in the March 29, 2003, issue of New Scientist Magazine.   The effort took place between 1991 and 2001.  The participants in the effort, which involved the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), the Space Warfare Systems Center, San Diego (SWSCSD: SPAWAR), and the Naval Air Warfare Weapons Division (in China Lake, CA), demonstrated that excess heat is being produced in Pons-Fleischmann-like experiments.  The Heat is the result of a nuclear reaction, at room temperature, in which deuterons are converted to helium-4, through an unusual process that does not create high energy particles.

More recently, scientists from SPAWAR (SWSCSD) have found a way to create high energy particles, but at low levels.  In 2002, SPAWAR, in collaboration with NRL and NAWC published a technical report. (SWSCSD, TR 1862: Thermal and Nuclear Aspects of the Pd/D2O System Vol.1: A Decade of Research at Navy Laboratories, [S. Szpak and P. A. Mosier–Boss, eds., Space Warfare Systems Center, San Diego, CA, 92152-5001, 2002],  119 pp.).

Prior to becoming an employee at NRL, Chubb worked, first, at Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois (between 1982 and 1985), and then, through a National Research Council Fellowship, as a Research Associate at NRL.

Scott Chubb is married to Anne Pond. They have three children, Scott Jr. (age 14), Lauren and Kathleen (both age 10).

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